This paper explores the relationship between the urban built environment and local policing arrangements in two Arab cities in Israel. Building on recent work examining the implementation of Combined Municipal Policing (CMP) in the city of Nazareth, it examines common spatial patterns of (in)visibility in Nazareth and Umm el Fahem that have resulted from decades of exclusion, confinement and neglect. Drawing on Ariel Handel’s work on “exclusionary surveillance” (Handel 2010 & 2017), it explores how these patterns of (in)visibility produce distinct “spatial regimes of power” that test, challenge and disrupt prevailing systems of ethnocratic control. In so doing, this paper seeks not only to draw attention to the local specificities of the Arab urban built environment in Israel but to develop a critique of prevailing approaches to the study of surveillance which assume, or centralise, the omnipotent, omniscient, panoptic power of the state. Ultimately, this work develops a broader interest in the latent and immanent political agency, or potency, of the Arab city to talk back to, and with, power.